Day Five... Horse, Flag and Eagle
“Do you stretch your legs?”
“Yeah, I walk.”
It’ll take me three days to get that.
Donnie pounds on my window while I’m making coffee and scares the shit out of me. He’s got the cordless in my hand and my Dad’s friend John Rosenberg is on the other end. We chat for a while, no I didn’t get his long message unfortunately because my iphone is just a Walkman at this juncture. John Rosenberg gives me directions to him and his wife Jean’s house just on the far edge of Prestonsburg in case I can’t catch GPS. I tell him I’ve got a scheduled conference call to get on at 2pm (ludicrous) and then I’ll head his way around 3. Dreama and Donnie and Donna and Barb have been talking about a big ol’ dinner they’re cooking up which, to my surprise, could be at 1 or 2 or 3 or 5. I don’t know what dinner means.
After some food and stretching my legs (*foreshadowing*) and walking Sadie… the storm rolls in. Mixed flocks of birds race out of the treelines along the creek ahead of the rolling grey clouds and just when I think I couldn’t be deeper in America… I spot a Bald Eagle. The Eagle buzzes the campground, no more than 15 feet above me. I’ve never seen one in flight. It lives up the river, they say. Don’t often see it. The rains follow.
Sadie and I retreat to the camper and close up the windows ahead of the deluge and wait it out writing it out. I get through Wednesday afternoon as far as the ride to Matewan. I’m still another spurt away from catching up to my present location and I’ve been setting here for close to two days.
As the clear blue skies disappear a thought’s jumped into my brain which is that I don’t know what time zone I’m in. I think it changes somewhere mid-Kentucky. Maybe my 2pm call which is the only item on my agenda causing stress, maybe it’s at 1pm. I go up to the office to find Dreama, but she’s nowhere around. I knock on her trailer door and her mother says she thought she was cooking up dinner in the kitchen off the office. I head back there and poke my head in, but she’s absent. I spy the phone though which is what I needed Dreama for. I grab it. When I come outside I see her down by the stables maybe tending to her horse in the thunder. Her Mom relaxes that she ain’t been struck by lightning and I call the dial-in number only to find that the mailbox isn’t live. So I did know what time it was.
Barb starts to tell me how she had nine teeth pulled last year and now she can’t eat anything solid and she doesn’t go to church, but still she loves the Lord and we’ll all go home someday. She says Donna says they have to look after Sissy cuz, “Dreama’s a child.” Donna calls Dreama Sissy and Dreama calls Donna Sissy and sometimes I get confused, but what’s clear is that Dreama’s pushing 50 and she never stops working. While Barb apparently only knows how to use her mouth to complain. I put the phone back to my ear and dial in again, grateful to escape Barb, but I find the mailbox still closed.
I wander down to the stables to make sure everything’s copacetic and it is, Nuggett is fine with the rainstorm. Dreama taps his foreleg and he pops a foot up and back while he eats hay and she checks his shoes. Nuggett, with two ts, is tan and tall with a floppy mop top like a teenager or a Beatle and Dreama says she needs to get it trimmed. I’d say I like it sloppy, looks a bit like mine, but I wish I had a haircut too. I’ve been eyeing barber shops for the past couple of days. That could be fun.
She mentions the manager Jack Varney who was here yesterday fixing the riding mower and cutting the grass, and Dreama just adores his wife Gilly and she prays for her, and I nod, showing I know she took sick. But Dreama’s been carrying his workload. She wants to complain, it’s obvious, and she apologizes as it starts to bubble up. She’s in the midst of cleaning the stables and cooking soup beans and the power went out with the storm and she’s had to reset it all and it’s putting her over the top. The problem with Gilly is she chain-smokes and she knows she’s got people sneaking her packs despite the cancer. Dreama reaches for a cigarette in the leather pouch strapped to her belt and she goes to light it, “Even though I should quit.” I tell her I used to smoke, probably will do again at some point. “It helps when you’re grieving,”I say, “When you’re facing tragedy. But then I found I was always smoking, always acting like I was facing tragedy, even when I wasn’t.” Dreama stares at me, still holding the unlit cigarette, wiping sweat and dirt from her face with the neck of her t-shirt she’s cut off to make a headband. The t-shirt says, “It’s hard to stumble when you’re on your knees” and there’s a Marlboro-looking man, holding the reins to his horse, taking a knee next to a wooden cross. I realize it as I’m saying the words: Dreama’s facing tragedy. “Come on,” I say. And she finally lets it all go.
She was married to Tony for 20 years, but then he started riding around with this ugly girl in their truck for everybody to see. Next thing you know he’s sold off everything they own that had just his name on it. The day he filed for divorce he already wasn’t wearing his wedding ring no more. Dreama was supposed to be recovering from having a hip replacement surgery, but Tony just kept yelling at her, “Get yer backside in the air,” and pulling her out of bed and putting her to work. That’s why she’s healed wrong. That and the doctor messed up. I ask if it’s Titanium and her face goes blank. She has no idea what they put inside of her. I ask if she did the physical therapy and she said she did, but it didn’t work and that’s why she got the surgery. I mean after, I ran track for 15 years, I’ve seen enough injuries and surgeries, had one myself, you gotta do strengthening and conditioning to re-educate your body.
“Do you stretch your legs?”
“Yeah, I walk.”
“Walking isn’t stretching,” I miss the joke, maybe she does too, maybe it’s not one. I’ll think the shit’s funny in three days. Dreama slips back into her lament, how Tony swapped out their truck for a Burgundy one cuz that’s the color he always wanted. When it was all done he’d sold her horse trailer and her truck and she had nothing left but Nuggett and the trailer home. I say ‘home’ because that thing is ringed with every bright yellow purple orange light up light you can find. She’s built a front yard with a fire pit and a picnic table and the American flag and it’s life. It’s lively. Ain’t no one crushing that out of her. She’s a builder. I want to give her something and I don’t quite know what it is, but I can’t give her the kind of attention she’s catching from her family who just want to prop her up any way they can.
“Will you do me a favor?” I beg Dreama, while she’s telling me how she don’t sleep much, lighter than a feather when she do. I suspect she hops up prematurely with a to-do list racking her brain like I do. I suspect she doesn’t give herself rest or ease. She’s got her bills paid for here, but she doesn’t collect enough commission to build much of a bankroll, not that she’d know where to move on to if she could. “What’s the favor?” she asks.
“Will you give yourself just 10, 15 minutes in the morning. Before you start working, before you do anything else, and just take inventory on how your body is feeling. Do some really light stretching, stand tall, bend at the waist, pick up a leg. You have to teach your body how to be straight. Only you can give that to yourself.”
“I have to,” she squints, “I have to.”
This woman doesn’t know what a hamstring is. Doesn’t know what a quadriceps is. Has never stretched a muscle. I’m no medicine man, just someone’s who’s watched every Queer Eye episode, but I can give her a few basics. Just for fun, I tell her this is yoga. She laughs.
“I like you, Dreama,” I recently watched the Mister Rogers documentary, it had an impact. I open my arms wide. She steps into a hug. “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself. Just 10 minutes a day.”
“I have to,” she sniffs. And gathers herself. Then she asks me a favor, “Would you take care of that?” I nod. And I pick up the American flag she’s motioned to, what’s blown down from the bent hook in the storm and I carry it back on my shoulder.
I swear to god this is exactly what happened.
